Brand building, beard building and Beardbrand

We recently came across this thread on Reddit about building a brand, from the founder of Beardbrand.

Beardbrand is a very distinctive business, which focuses on promoting and selling beard care products. Though it is a niche market, the advantages and disadvantages of brand building as set out by Beardbrand founder Eric Bandholz are universal and applicable to product and service brands.

If you rank products on how essential they are, beard care may come in quite low. The service itself is highly selective, has a small market and understanding customer behaviour is also an issue. Yet in less than a year, they went from $0 in sales to $120k/month in sales.

The keys to their brand and financial success, in our opinion, are:

1) Brand Consistency
As Eric explains, consistency has been a fundamental element from the very start of his business. For SMEs, budgets for branding, product design and marketing are often low in order to save up for production and distribution costs. Nevertheless, Eric realised the importance of how good design and branding can build up a strong identity not only for his products but also for the company itself.

As you may imagine, a new company with the word ‘brand’ in its name starts with a good appreciation for brand building.

Eric states that it is a must to either have good skills in design or invest in quality designers. He appreciates the fact that designers can help with brand guidelines to keep businesses on track and know how to keep branding activities consistent.

2) The Spread of Messages
A wide range of communication channels was used to open the market door for the products. Both PR and marketing tactics were integrated cleverly in creating customers’ awareness about the brand and building their interest in it. You can see that Eric has a clear, precise and strong vision as shown in this video. He sends these messages repeatedly, consistently and cleverly on all channels. Even the media kit shows great taste in design and is extremely newsworthy (which lots of companies simply forget) and a variety of trade shows where Beardbrand exhibits demonstrates strong research and insight into the market.

Of course, the strength of the brand equates to costs which are ongoing to support social media, marketing, PR, product development and product extensions. That is why Grain’s own work with clients is relationship-based rather than project-based. Brand building is not a one-off thing: it needs great care and maintenance. However, as Eric points out, financial success and customer loyalty is the well-earned payback.